


death is a lie, death is not the end

by W1F1N1GHTM4R3



Series: Lumith Danganronpa [2]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: And this thing is how my other fic breaks canon!, Character tags will be added as they die in the main story, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Not Canon Compliant, YOU NEED TO READ “what makes an end the final ending” FOR THIS TO MAKE SENSE THIS IS CONNECTED TO IT, but this is how I’m gonna give development to everyone who didn’t get what the deserved, i mean obviously the characters are coming from being dead to being here, please be aware I do describe their death wounds (not super in depth but it’s still there), welcome to the dead realm folks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 09:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20405194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/W1F1N1GHTM4R3/pseuds/W1F1N1GHTM4R3
Summary: Upon dying in the killing game, each and every person who dies finds themselves somewhere they’ve never been before.





	death is a lie, death is not the end

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, welcome to the dead realm! Here I’m taking the chance to develop the characters who were disrespected by canon or just never got the development they deserved, by sending them somewhere else and working with them there. Don’t be surprised if Sayaka is super important here, I kinda got really attached to her and discovered I like writing for her.

Sayaka Maizono doesn’t know how she’s alive.

Or is she alive at all?

Her clothes are clearly torn where the knife was stabbed through her stomach and are stained with her blood, just like she was killed. But the wound isn’t bleeding, and it’s quickly sealing itself up. It hurts, but not as bad.

Could she feel pain if she was dead?

She wish she knew what was going on.

She’s just tired, sore, and confused, surrounded by screens that she doesn’t bother observing right now. All she wants is a place to sleep and a fresh change of clothes.

So she pulls herself off the ground, and slowly makes her way to the hallway leading away from the room she’s in. It’s the only way out of here, and her best bet for finding anything she might need.

And down the hall are two rooms, one marked “Common Room” and the other with her nameplate on it. A little strange, that there’s only a room for her, and that it’s specifically _hers_, but she’s so tired, she won’t question it for now. That can wait for the morning. The fight happened relatively late at night after all, and she hadn’t slept since the previous night.

She carefully opens the door to her room, just in case it’s somehow trapped. It’s not. The contents of the room are... almost exactly the same as in Hope’s Peak. Same appearance, same layout, same everything. It’s set up exactly as it was that first day, where it’s a little too neat, waiting to be lived in, but that’s fine.

She gets changed quickly, noting that her wound has nearly completely healed already. She’d take a shower to properly wash the blood off, but she’s not sure if the water turns off here like it does at the school, and most of it was soaked into her shirt anyway. It’s not too bad with just clean clothes for now. She’ll finish with it in the morning.

Finally ready to give in to her exhaustion, she climbs into the bed and practically blacks out.

————

She’s still woken up by the same morning announcement as before. It’s a little strange that it still plays here, but there must be a reason for it.

She gets up and starts to get ready, noticing she actually has a larger variety of clothes here, instead of just a lot of the same handful of outfits. Cool, she’s got more options now.

As she’s finishing up, she notices a note on her table that definitely wasn’t there before. Weird. She picks it up, and begins to read.

_Sayaka-_

_Apologies that you were the first to die, but welcome to the spectating area. From here, you now have the ability to watch the events of the killing game, but are no longer involved directly in it. Therefore, you are essentially immune to harm here, and if you were to sustain any sort of injury, it would heal at an extremely amplified rate, as you likely have noticed already._

_If you want to watch the continuing killing game, return to the room you first arrived in and get a pair of headphones. Follow the instructions to set them up, and find the screens you want to keep an eye on._

_It is also recommended to stay there in preparation of additional arrivals, as anyone else who dies will arrive there upon moment of death. You will be required to inform the others of the details of this note, as none additional will be sent out to any further casualties._

_The screens are showing activity in real time, and the day and night announcements are still active in the spectating area, so you can sleep after the nighttime announcement when most activity has died down, if you so choose to. You may also access the common room and its contents at any time._

_-FF_

Who the hell is “FF”? Sayaka doesn’t know anyone with those initials, at least not off the top of her head. Can she trust this note, not knowing who sent it?

Some of the details, she already knows are accurate, at the very least. The unusually high-speed recovery and the daily announcements, both of which she’s already experienced.

She might as well test if the information about being able to watch the killing game is true.

She puts the note away in a drawer in case she ends up needing it again, and leaves her room. Nothing’s changed in the hallway yet, it’s still the strange, mostly empty hallway with only the door she just exited, the common room door, and the doorway to the original room. Now she notices that the hallway stretches further past her room, but it’s nothing but walls. No doors, no decorations, nothing.

But that’s not what she needs to focus on for now.

She goes through the doorway to the room she started in, and back into the large, screen-filled, circular room. It’s still dark in here, the only illumination coming the active screens (which are less than half of them according to her quick glance) and the cerulean glow from her own markings.

Most of the class is in the dining hall, as the screen shows. Possibly all of them? She’s not looking too intensely right now, she’ll do that once she finishes searching the room.

While before the room was mostly empty, there are now a variety of seating options scattered around the room, probably so anyone who wants to watch the screens can do so without having to stand around the whole time if they don’t want to. There’s also a rather large box back near the doorway.

Considering that’s the only sort of storage at all nearby, Sayaka assumes that’s probably where the headphones are stored. She opens it, and sure enough, that’s a whole bunch of fancy, bulky headphones. These would probably drown out anything outside of what plays through them, they look like they’ll be pretty soundproof. There’s also a sheet of instructions that explain how to get them connected to the screens and able to listen to the conversations going on in the room she’s set to.

She follows the instructions as best she can, trying to sync them to the dining hall, and puts them on. And... yep! That sounds like the right place. It’s a little quieter than she expected though, but not in the volume her headphones are playing at. The conversation just is quieter and tenser than usual.

And then the quiet is broken by a loud announcement cheering, “a body has been discovered! Three people have seen a body, therefore, it’s investigation time! Everyone, please make your way to the gym, so we can go over the investigation rules.”

Sayaka scans the screens for Makoto’s room, assuming the body is her own and it hasn’t been moved. Sure enough, there’s his room, and... Makoto himself, being carried out. She can’t hear anything in there, but he looks unconscious.

She doesn’t need to listen in the dining hall anymore, and begins adjusting the headset to listen to the gym instead.

It takes a while before anything happens in there, Monokuma not showing up until Makoto wakes. The rules aren’t exciting, the group is given an undefined amount of time to investigate the school for clues that will reveal the killer, and then the class goes into a trial.

What Sayaka notices, is how excited Monokuma is to share the rules, and how Junko seems to be getting incredibly tense, and not in a nervous way. She seems angry, like she might explode and hurt someone.

And that’s certainly what happens, although it’s Monokuma who’s her target, and she nearly crushes him under her boot before Monokuma calls out for spears that shoot from the ground and through her body.

Junko falls to the ground, dead.

Sayaka pulls off her headphones. If the note was right, she’ll appear here.

Something (someone?) thumps on the ground behind her.

Electric blue glow (dimmed but quickly brightening), black shirt, red skirt, tall boots, holes across her body from the spears, it looks like Junko in every way, except that her hair is short and dark, not long and pink like before.

Is it actually Junko? Was the girl who died right there not Junko, or did someone else (someone Sayaka has never seen before), who wasn’t supposed to be here, get sent instead?

————

Mukuro Ikusaba feels like _shit_. And that’s probably an understatement. She just got impaled repeatedly, and somehow, here she is, seemingly not dead, but certainly not in great shape.

That can’t be surprising, though.

At least the holes are closing quickly.

Wait, is someone watching her, or is that just her imagination?

Yeah, she’s being watched.

Sayaka’s warm blue eyes are trained on her, watching her intensely. For someone who seems so sweet, that glare is full of distrust.

It doesn’t help that her markings are clearly flickering angrily in the low lighting.

**SAYAKA_MAIZONO:** who the hell are you?

Weird, Mukuro can hear Sayaka talking, but her words are also appearing in the air, like a little chat box popping up in the corner of her eye.

**MUKURO_IKUSABA:** Junko Enoshima? Who else would I be?

Fuck. It says her actual name on the side.

**SAYAKA_MAIZONO:** that’s not what the chat bubble thing says. don’t lie to me.

Sayaka looks like she’s about ready to lunge out of her seat and fight Mukuro. Not that it would exactly end well, but Sayaka wouldn’t know that. She doesn’t know Mukuro’s real talent, after all.

**MUKURO_IKUSABA:** Okay, fine. Like it says, I’m Mukuro Ikusaba, the Ultimate Soldier. Junko’s my twin sister. I’m not sure where she is right now, but I was disguised as her and taking her place. Is that enough of an explanation for you?

————

That sounds incredibly unbelievable to Sayaka, but she feels nothing but sincerity (and maybe a little frustration) coming from Mukuro’s words. Being an empath, on top of being naturally perceptive, does have its benefits occasionally, but it’s still got limitations. And so far, she’d been completely unable to pierce Mukuro’s mental barrier around her emotions.

Does Mukuro know she can read emotions? Is that why she got a reading now, did she intentionally open herself to being read so Sayaka would know it was true?

Mukuro’s antenna twitches (strange, most of the time, antennae motions happen with longer or more unusual-shaped ones (Sayaka herself knows that despite the length, hers don’t do much unless she’s reading emotions), but Mukuro’s are almost perfectly vertical and on the smaller side). She’s closed off her emotions again, so Sayaka can’t read what it means. Especially since she’s not expressing it anywhere else.

Mukuro takes a few steps forward and starts waving her hand in Sayaka’s face.

**MUKURO_IKUSABA:** Hello? Sayaka, you still in there?  
**SAYAKA_MAIZONO:** huh, yeah. i still don’t know how probable that stuff is but i can tell you didn’t lie so i guess i just have to accept it. and where would i have gone? i can’t project myself out of my body or anything like that.  
**MUKURO_IKUSABA:** Well, at least that’s settled.

There’s a moment of awkward pause as the conversation seems to end, until Sayaka remembers something, and Mukuro realizes she still has another question.

**MUKURO_IKUSABA:** Do you know anywhere I can get some not-stabbed-and-coated-in-blood clothes—?  
**SAYAKA_MAIZONO:** you might want to check down the hall if you’ve got a room there. get yourself cleaned up, or at least get some clean clothes, and try to be back before the trial.  
**MUKURO_IKUSABA:** Okay. I guess I’ll be back in a few minutes then.

And Mukuro walks out, quickly becoming nothing more than a bright blue glow around the corner.

————

Sure enough, like Sayaka said, there’s a hall with rooms off of it. Or rather, three rooms, a common space, a room labeled for Sayaka, and one for herself. There’s a lot more hall space though.

<strike>She tries not to think about how all that space will be for everyone else who dies. It doesn’t work.</strike>

She pulls her door open to a relatively empty room, just like back at the school. She’s never had many things to decorate her room with, so she’s never bothered doing anything at all.

But all she’s here for right now is some clean clothes, ideally not another one of Junko’s outfits.

And lucky for her, none of the clothes here, besides what she’s wearing, seem to be Junko’s kind of stuff. She’s not going to try and find anything too nice right now, it might be uncomfortable with her injuries still closing up, even if they’re mostly done by now.

So she just pulls out a plain t-shirt and sweatpants and changes into them. It’s not like anyone’s gonna see her right now besides Sayaka, and she doesn’t care about what Sayaka thinks of her outfit. She’d rather be comfortable.

Once she’s good to go, she heads back to the screen room. Sayaka shows her how to set up a headset, and they settle down just in time as every active screen shifts to show the trial room.

Mukuro finds herself sprawled out over a spinning chair, relatively comfortable, as the trial of Sayaka’s murder begins.


End file.
